Marine Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN)

Introduction

The intertidal zone – the region between the low and high tide lines along the coasts of the world’s oceans – serves as a key test bed for exploring the effects of global climate change on species distributions and abundances. We are designing and deploying wireless “biomimetic” sensor networks (WSN) that monitor environmental parameters pertaining to climate change impacts (e.g., temperature).

Monitoring the intertidal zone using WSNs remains challenging because the constraints of sizes, energy, and dynamic environment. The size of a sensor node should no bigger than a real mussel include sensor chip, antenna and battery, which requires a carefully design of the hardware and ultra-low power consumption. Unlike the traditional WSNs, MWSN faces the challenges of the poor deployment environment – periodic tidal. Sensor nodes deployed in intertidal zone will periodically submerged in water and loss connectivity with network. With the rise of the water level, the entire network will gradually be submerged and the network is disconnected eventually. To efficiently rebuild the network with minimum energy consumption is the first challenge. We now have successfully deployed three MWSNs around world.